The Great Litany was the first service written in English. It was composed by Thomas Cranmer in 1544 from older litanies: the Sarum rite litany, a Latin litany composed by Martin Luther, and the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. The word litany comes from the Latin litania, from the Greek litê, meaning “prayer” or “supplication.”

After invoking the Trinity, we ask to be delivered from the evils that come upon us because of sin: heresy, schism, natural disasters, political disasters, war, violence, murder, sudden death.

Litanies are penitential exercises. They are the urgent supplications of the people of God suffering under or dreading divine judgements and asking to be spared or delivered from calamities which at the same time they confess that they deserve. This form of the fear of the Lord is characteristic of the prophets of Israel.

Whatever our control of nature may be, it remains true that we are in the hands of a Power beyond us. Both our reason and our faith drive us to the recognition that this governing Power is a personal God and a righteous God who visits men and nations with judgements on their sins; though we may, if we choose, blind our eyes to the evidences of divine judgement and neglect that humble and penitent return to God which they are intended to stimulate. This Lent let us in penitence turn to Him that we may turn away from evil and be spared His righteous judgement.

O Love, how deep, how broad, how high is a translation by Benjamin Webb (1819–1885) of the text O amor quam exstaticus, from a 15th c. Latin poem written by someone influenced by the Devotio Moderna and Thomas à Kempis.

1 O love, how deep, how broad, how high,
how passing thought and fantasy,
that God, the Son of God, should take
our mortal form for mortals’ sake!

2 He sent no angel to our race,
of higher or of lower place,
but wore the robe of human frame,
and He Himself to this world came.

3 For us baptized, for us He bore
His holy fast, and hungered sore;
for us temptations sharp He knew,
for us the tempter overthrew.

4 For us to wicked men betrayed,
scourged, mocked, in crown of thorns arrayed,
He bore the shameful cross and death
for us at length gave up His breath.

5 For us He rose from death again,
for us He went on high to reign,
for us He sent His Spirit here
to guide, to strengthen, and to cheer.

6 All glory to our Lord and God
for love so deep, so high, so broad —
the Trinity whom we adore
forever and forevermore.

Webb was an Anglican clergyman, a member of the Cambridge Camden Society which studied medieval art and liturgy, and a close friend of his fellow student at Trinity, John Mason Neale.

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Forty days and forty nights

The Anglican clergyman George Hunt Smyttan (1822-1870) wrote a poem, which was published in the March 1856 edition of The Penny Post and was revised five years later as Forty Days and Forty Nights in Hymns Fitted to the Order of Common Prayer (1861), by the Rev. Francis Pott (1832–1909).

1 Forty days and forty nights
you were fasting in the wild;
forty days and forty nights
tempted, and yet undefiled.

2 Shall not we your sorrow share
and from worldly joys abstain,
fasting with unceasing prayer,
strong with you to suffer pain?

3 Then if Satan on us press,
flesh or spirit to assail,
victor in the wilderness,
grant that we not faint nor fail!

4 So shall we have peace divine:
holier gladness ours shall be;
round us, too, shall angels shine,
such as served you faithfully.

5 Keep, O keep us, Savior dear,
ever constant by your side,
that with you we may appear
at the eternal Eastertide.

Drop, Drop, slow tears, And bathe those beauteous feet,Which brought from heav’n The news and Prince of Peace: Cease not, wet eyes, His mercy to entreat; To cry for vengeance, Sin doth never cease. In your deep floods Drown all my faults and fears; Nor let His eye See sin, but through my tears.

Perhaps nowhere is William Walton’s precocity evidenced as clearly as in his Litany (1916) — composed when he was only 15 years old. The work is a setting of a devotional text by seventeenth-century writer Phineas Fletcher, whose penitential poetry finds evocative realization in Walton’s a cappella rendering. Walton scholars note the skill demonstrated by the composer’s voice leading; his harmonic choices, while not necessarily possessing the measured dramatic weight of a mature composer, certainly do not seem the work of an adolescent. Particularly effective is the ambiguous harmony with which the piece begins: a dissonant and disorienting augmented chord, followed by a closely overlapping and likewise dissonant diminished chord, which finally settles at the fourth bar into the E minor harmony upon which the work is built.

Homophonic declamation generally predominates, though various other textures are employed with poignant effects. First and foremost is the pictorial rendering of the repeated word “Drop,” which Walton sets as a descending sequence of leaps in the soprano. Elsewhere, polyphonic divergence sets up moments of tension, as in the “cry for vengeance” of the second stanza. Some observe in the final cadence a foreshadow of the kind of harmonic practice Walton would utilize in later works; the final resolution to an E minor triad is approached and made all the more resolute by a handful of shimmeringly dissonant half steps.

The poem is by the English poet, priest and metaphysician, Phineas Fletcher, (1582-1650) who earned a B.A. in 1604 and M.A. in 1608 from King’s College, Cambridge. By 1611 he had become a fellow at the college. He was known for pastorals and theological poetry. In A Litany, Fletcher’s speaker is hoping to weap enough that the tears will wash Christ’s feet to satisfaction; hoping that the tears will purge relentless sin; that the Lord shall not “See sin, but through my tears.”

Sir William Walton (1902-1983) was a significant composer of orchestral music and one of the major figures to emerge in England between Vaughan Williams and Britten. Born to a family of professional musicians, Walton began his musical studies singing anthems in his father’s Anglican church choir. His output was varied, ranging from the Viola Concerto and the colorful and impressive cantata ‘Belshazzar’s Feast,’ to small choral pieces such as ‘A Litany.’

William Byrd maintained a precarious position as a Catholic in Protestant England. He dutifully provided Protestant church music of a very high caliber, as well as a wealth of courtly instrumental and vocal music. The resultant favor of the Queen and the potency of his noble patrons also allowed Byrd to compose and print music for the Catholic liturgy under his own name, even during times of crackdown when possession of the same books could be grounds for suspicion and arrest. In 1591, the year of his retirement to a recusant Catholic home in Stondon Massey, Byrd released through the press of Thomas East the second volume of his Cantiones sacrae, containing Miserere mei Deus and 20 other Latin motets. It seems that his intention in the print was twofold: he was first providing functional music for domestic performance in the private chapels of his Catholic patrons such as Sir John Petre and Edward Somerset. At the same time, the careful ordering of music within the 1591 print, which creates a large-scale modal descent through several keys, and the overwhelming number of mournful texts Byrd selected, suggest he was also expressing his own spiritual travail.

Miserere mei Deus shows both of these characteristics. Though Byrd set the plaintive text from Psalm 51 to a full five-voiced texture, only the two tenor parts are particularly broad in range, and the composer’s frequent recourse to chordal homophony makes Miserere mei Deus quite accessible (perfect for domestic performance). At the same time, Byrd took a lot of care in crafting the little motet. It concludes the five-voiced section of the 1591 printed anthology, and thus represents the deepest modal descent, into a G mode with fully two flats in its key signature; it does, however, begin quite naturally as an echo to the final chord of the preceding motet, Exsurge Domine. And despite the superficial simplicity of the music, Byrd wrought in it a powerfully affective cry for God’s mercy. It opens with two homophonic invocations to God, unified in texture and poignancy of cadence (plagal and Phrygian). The composer breaks into polyphony in the following phrase, “according to thy great mercy”; the imitative motives both rise aspirantly upwards and offer a subtle pun on the Latin secundum (after). A second homophonic passage is again answered with polyphony, this time a painfully extended passage of repeated cries, each reiterating the manifold sins of those praying for release.

Here it is played by Thorsten Pirkl an der Kreienbrink-Orgel in the Pfarrkirche Maria Hilf, Bachrain

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Hymns

Lord, who throughout these forty days

Claudia Frances Ibotson Hernaman’s hymn, Lord, who throughout these forty days, signals the beginning of Lent and is often sung during Ash Wednesday services or throughout the season of Lent. Forty is a number with special biblical significance. It rained for forty days and nights when the earth was overtaken by floodwaters, and Noah waited another forty days before opening the window of the Ark. Israel wandered in the desert for forty years. Jesus was seen on earth following the resurrection for forty days. In this case, Christ’s forty days in the wilderness provides the primary paradigm for the forty days of Lent.

Claudia Hernaman (1838-1898) was born in Surrey, England, and died in Brussels, Belgium. She was the daughter of an Anglican minister, and she married a minister who also served as a school inspector. Like so many other women hymn writers of the nineteenth century, she was devoted to the religious education of children. Toward this end, she wrote 150 hymns in several collections, some original and some translated from Latin.

“Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days” appeared first in her Child’s Book of Praise; A Manual for Devotion in Simple Verse (1873). It was not included in hymnals, however, until the mid-twentieth century, when it appeared in the Irish Church Hymnal (1960) and Hymns for Church and School (1964). By the 1970s, “Lord, who throughout these forty days” was a standard hymn in most hymnals in the United States. It is based on the account of the temptation of Jesus found in three Gospels — Matthew 4:1-11; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-13.

As is the case with many hymns, Christ’s life becomes a model for how his followers should confront temptation. The first two lines of the stanzas focus on a response of Christ when he faced temptation; the last two lines encourage Christians to model their behavior on Christ’s example. This is a familiar pattern for children’s hymns from the days of Isaac Watts. It obviously strikes a chord with adult believers as well.

The classic themes of the Lenten season are presented in the stanzas of this hymn:

Lord, who throughout these forty days,
For us didst fast and pray,
Teach us with thee to mourn our sins,
And close by thee to stay.

As thou with Satan didst contend,
And didst the victory win,
O give us strength in thee to fight,
In thee to conquer sin.

As thou didst hunger bear and thirst,
So teach us, gracious Lord,
To die to self, and chiefly live
By thy most holy word.

And through these days of penitence,
And through thy Passion-tide,
Yea, evermore, in life and death,
Jesus! with us abide.

Abide with us, that so, this life
Of suffering overpast,
An Easter of unending joy
We may attain at last!

Claudia Frances Ibotson Hernaman (1838-1898) was the daughter of the Rev. William Haywood Ibotson, was perpetual curate of Addlestone. She married the Rev. J.W.M. Hernaman, a school inspector. She was the author of The Child’s Book of Praise: A Manual of Devotion in Simple Verse (1873), and co-editor (with Elizabeth Harcourt Mitchell and Walter Plimpton) of the Anglo-Catholic Altar Hymnal: A Book of Song for Use at the Celebration of the Holy Eucharist (words-only edition 1884, with music 1885). She also published The Crown of Life: Verses for Holy Seasons (1886) and wrote The Conversion and Martyrdom of St Alban: a Sacred Drama (1891). She edited an anthology, Lyra Consolationis. From the poets of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1890).

This is our accepted time was written in 1955 by the Sulpician priest Fr. Michael Gannon. It is set to the 1609 tune, WEIMAR (Vulpius) by composer, Melchior Vulpius (c.1560–1615).

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The glory of these forty days

In this Lenten hymn attributed to Pope St. Gregory the Great (540—604), The glory of these forty days, the typology so frequently used by the Fathers is employed. We are told that our fast, which we keep in imitation of our Lord’s fast, was prefigured in the Old Testament – by Moses, fasting before receiving the Law; by Elijah who, while fasting, was given the vision of the chariot of fire; and by Daniel who, through fasting and meditation, was delivered from the lions’ den. And, as St. John the Forerunner fasted and became the herald of the Messiah, we pray that we may, through our fasting, be prepared to see our Lord.

The translator was Maurice Frederick Bell (1862-1947). He graduated from Hertford College., Oxford (B.A. 1884, M.A. 1887), was ordained a deacon in 1885, and a priest in 1886, and was Vicar of St. Mark, Regent’s Park, London. He contributed to The English Hymnal, 1906, four translations , and “O dearest Lord, by all adored” (Close of Festival), 1906.

1. The glory of these forty days
we celebrate with songs of praise,
for Christ, through whom all things were made,
himself has fasted and has prayed.

2. Alone and fasting Moses saw
the loving God who gave the law,
and to Elijah, fasting, came
the steeds and chariots of flame.

3. So Daniel trained his mystic sight,
delivered from the lions’ might,
and John, the Bridegroom’s friend, became
the herald of Messiah’s name.

4. Then grant us, Lord, like them to be
full oft in fast and prayer with thee;
our spirits strengthen with thy grace,
and give us joy to see thy face.

5. O Father, Son and Spirit blest,
to thee be every prayer addressed,
who art in threefold name adored,
from age to age, the only Lord.

Lord in thy rage rebuke me not for my most grievous sin, nor in thine anger chasten me, but let me favour win. Have mercy Lord on me, because my state is weak to see, heal me, O Lord, for that my bones are troubled sore in me.

Born in Montpellier, Jeanne Demessieux was the second child of Marie-Madeleine Demessieux (née Mézy) and Étienne Demessieux. After taking private piano lessons with her elder sister, Yolande, Jeanne entered the Montpellier Conservatoire in 1928. Four years later, she obtained first prizes in solfège and piano. In 1933, she began her studies at the Paris Conservatoire; studying piano with Simon Riera and Magda Tagliaferro, harmony with Jean Gallon, counterpoint and fugue with Noël Gallon, and composition with Henri Büsser. The same year, she was appointed titular organist at Saint-Esprit, a post she held for 29 years.

From 1936-39, Demessieux studied organ privately with Marcel Dupré, whose organ class at the Conservatoire she joined in 1939. After receiving a first prize in organ performance and improvisation in 1941, Demessieux studied privately with Dupré in Meudon for five more years, before she played her début concert at Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1946. This was the beginning of her career as an international concert organist. Demessieux gave more than 700 concerts in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States. She had memorized more than 2,500 works, including the complete organ works of Bach, Franck, Liszt, and Mendelssohn, and all of Dupré’s organ works up to Opus 41. A prolific recording artist, she was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque Award in 1960 for her complete recording of Franck’s organ works (1958).

In 1962, Demessieux was appointed as titular organist at La Madeleine in Paris. She combined this with demanding academic duties, serving as professor of organ both at the Nancy Conservatoire (1950–52) and later at the Conservatoire Royal in Liège (1952–68). In 1967, she signed a contract with Decca for a recording of the complete organ works by Olivier Messiaen, which was not realized due to her death the following year.

Jeanne Demessieux died in Paris on 11 November 1968 from the effects of throat cancer. A large crowd, including Marcel Dupré, attended her funeral at La Madeleine. The great organ remained silent, and a vast black drape hung from the gallery to the floor.

Charles Arnould Tournemire (1870 – 1939) was a French composer and organist, notable partly for his improvisations which were often rooted in the music of Gregorian chant. His compositions include eight symphonies (one of them choral), four operas, twelve chamber works and eighteen piano solos; but he is remembered largely for his organ music, the best known being set of pieces L’Orgue Mystique, a group of 51 sets of five pieces each (except for Holy Saturday, which contains only three pieces), all written between 1927 and 1932. This collection covers the cycle of the Roman Catholic liturgical year, each set being based on the Gregorian chants for the day.

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Hymns

How firm a foundation(LYONS)

How firm a foundation (1787) is a hymn that for over two centuries has assured believers of the faithfulness of Christ and the certainty of hope. The first verse acts as an introduction, giving us cause to stop and ponder the Word of assurance that God has given us, described in greater detail in the next four verses. Those four verses are in fact paraphrases of Scripture passages: Isaiah 41:10, 43:2, Romans 8:3-39, Hebrews 13:5, and Deuteronomy 31:6. In the words of this hymn, we carry with us the Word from God, and the call to trust in that Word. But God’s Word is expansive and not limited to letters on a page — the fifth verse moves us to a trust in the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ. Thus we are assured by the words we sing, the Word we are given, and the Word made flesh, of the steadfastness of God and His unfailing love.

In John Rippon’s A Selection of Hymns (1787, plus numerous subsequent editions), “How Firm a Foundation” (no. 128) is attributed simply to “K—”. The author of the hymn has never been definitively identified.

How firm a foundation you saints of the Lord,
is laid for your faith in his excellent Word!
What more can he say than to you he has said,
to you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?

“Fear not, I am with you, O be not dismayed,
for I am your God, and will still give you aid;
I’ll strengthen you, help you, and cause you to stand,
upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

“When through the deep waters I call you to go,
the rivers of sorrow shall not overflow,
for I will be with you in trouble to bless,
and sanctify to you your deepest distress.

“Even down to old age, all my people shall prove
My sovereign, eternal, unchangeable love;
And when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn,
Like lambs they shall still in my bosom be borne.”

“The soul that on Jesus hath lean’d for repose,
I will not, I will not, desert to his foes;
That soul, tho’ all hell should endeavour to shake,
I’ll never – no never- no never forsake.”

Joseph Martin Kraus

The tune LYONS is by Joseph Martin Kraus (20 June 1756 – 15 December 1792), was a composer in the classical era who was born in Miltenberg am Main, Germany. He moved to Sweden at age 21, and died at the age of 36 in Stockholm. He is sometimes referred to as “the Swedish Mozart”, and had a life span which was very similar to that of Mozart’s.

Lord Jesus, think on me is a translation by the Anglican clergyman Allen William Chatfield (1808-1896) of the Greek hymn, Μνώεο Χριστέ by Synesius of Cyrene (375-430). Synesius was the Bishop of Ptolomais, one of the ancient capitals of Cyrenaica that is today part of modern day Libya.

Synesius was descended from a wealthy and illustrious family which, according to the historian Edward Gibbons, could trace its descent back seventeen centuries to Spartan Kings. In his youth, he went to Alexandria and was educated under the celebrated woman Neo-Platonist, Hypatia. As an adult, he became wealthy and was known as a sportsman, a brilliant philosopher, a statesman, an eloquent orator, and a man of noble character.

Also, Synesius was a friend of Augustine of Hippo. When invasions by the Goths were threatening his country, he sought to persuade Emperor Arcadius about the imminent danger, but without success. After marrying a Christian in 403, he was converted to Christianity and a few years later was made bishop of Ptolemais by popular demand in 410. In spite of his dissent from some of the tenets of the church, his outstanding character alone made him acceptable. Around 410, Synesius published a series of ten hymns in which he set forth Christian doctrine. They show the evidences of Semitic influence on classic Greek poetry. “Lord Jesus, Think On Me” is the last of the ten. After having outlived his beloved wife and lost all his sons to a plague, he died around A. D. 430 in Ptolemais, although some authorities give the date as early as 414.

The tune SOUTHWELL was composed by Herbert Stephen Irons (1834 -1905). He became a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral under T. E. Jones. After studying music under Stephen Elvey at Oxford, he was appointed organist at St. Columba’s College, a large public school at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, Ireland. He stayed there only a few months before being offered the position of organist at Southwell Minister. From Southwell, he went to Chester as assistant organist to Frederic Gunton. Three years later, he accepted an appointment at St. Andrew’s Church, Nottingham, where he remained until his death.

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Thou art the Way(DUNDEE)

Thou art the Way isby the Episcopal Bishop George Washington Doane (1799-1859). “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me” (John 14:6). In His sayings which begin “ἐγώ εἰμί, ego eimi, I am,” Jesus implicitly makes a claim to divinity, because the name of God is יְהֹוָה, YHWH, “I AM WHO AM.” Jesus is the only Way to the Father, because Jesus alone is God and man and unites the two; Jesus is the only Truth, because He reveals the Father and He reveals the ultimate meaning of creation, which is Himself, in whom and for whom the universe was created; Jesus is the only true Life, which death itself could not destroy, and which through His resurrection and the power of the Spirit He pours forth onto a dying world to rescue it from eternal death.

Thou art the Way: by thee alone
from sin and death we flee;
and they who would the Father seek
must seek him, Lord, by thee.
Thou art the Truth: thy word alone
true wisdom can impart;
thou only canst inform the mind
and purify the heart.
Thou art the Life: the rending tomb
proclaims thy conquering arm;
and those who put their trust in thee
nor death nor hell shall harm.
Thou art the Way, the Truth, the Life:
grant us that Way to know,
that Truth to keep, that Life to win,
whose joys eternal flow.

George Washington Doane, D.D. was born at Trenton, New Jersey, May 27, 1799, and graduated at Union College, Schenectady, New York. Ordained in 1821, he was Assistant Minister at Trinity Church, New York, till 1824. In 1824 he became a Professor at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn.; in 1828 Rector of Trinity Church, Boston; and, in 1832, Bishop of New Jersey. Influenced by the Oxford Movement, Doane prepared the American edition of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1834).

As a young priest Doane published Songs by the Way: chiefly devotional, with translations and imitations (1824). This included many of his hymns, of which the best known are ‘Softly now the light of day’, and ‘Thou art the way; to Thee alone’. The latter was one of only two American hymns to be included in the First Edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern (1861)

O Lord, the maker of all thing, We pray thee now in this evening Us to defend through thy mercy From all deceit of our enemy. Let neither us deluded be, Good Lord, with dream or fantasy; Our hearts waking in thee thou keep That we in sin fall not on sleep. O Father, through thy blessed Son, Grant us this our petition, To whom, with the Holy Ghost always, In heaven and earth be laud and praise.

Coming of age during the reign of Henry VIII, Mundy’s career spanned much of England’s Tudor Dynasty, and reflected the changes in church music that accompanied the religious turmoil of that period. Mundy’s extant body of sacred music consists of two masses, six Anglican service settings, the single Kyrie, twenty-two motets (in Latin), thirteen anthems, and large number of musical settings for specific Psalms.

Mundy’s best known piece, the service setting, Oh Lord, the Maker of All Things, first published in Barnard’s partbook (First Book of Selected Church Musick), was—bizarrely—originally attributed to Henry VIII. Composer and music historian Ernest Walker, held that particular contrapuntal service to be “one of the very finest of all written for the English ritual”

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Postlude

O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß, BWV 622, J. S. Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach composed a chorale prelude, BWV 622 to this Lutheran hymn tune. In the second version of his St John Passion, he began the work with a chorale fantasia on the first stanza of the hymn, which he later modified to conclude Part I of his St Matthew Passion as movement 29.

Michael Murray plays the famous 1738 Christian Muller Organ, that Handel and Mozart made pilgrimages to, at the Great Church of St. Bavo, Haarlem, the Netherlands, performing Bach’s Chorale Prelude O Mensch, Bewein Dein Sunde Gross, BWV 622.

Thou whose almighty word was written by the Anglican clergyman John Marriott (1780-1825). It is a call to mission, reminding us that the essence of the Church is mission, to bring light to the world. At the beginning, God said “Let there be light,” and now in our time the Father again through his Word lets the light of the Gospel shine into the chaos and darkness of the world. The hymn is also Trinitarian, reminding us that all three Persons bring light: the Father who through the word created the universe and recreates it through the Gospel; the Son, who comes like the rays of the rising sun, “with healing in his wings” (Malachi 4:2), with a light which heals diseased minds and gives light to the blind; the Spirit who at the beginning moved over the dark waters and who now broods over the darkness of the world to bring the light of Christ to the dark earth.

Formerly Christian countries are now mission lands, and are filled with darkness and error. Among us are those whose minds are sick with lies, whose minds are darkened, who are despairing and see no life beyond the grave. The Gospel brings life and hope because it shows that the chaos of the world is being transformed by the light of the Gospel of the Risen Lord.

Thou, whose almighty word
Chaos and darkness heard,
And took their flight
Hear us, we humbly pray,
And where the gospel-day
Sheds not its glorious ray,
Let there be light!

Thou, who didst come to bring
On thy redeeming wing
Healing and sight,
Health to the sick in mind,
Sight to the inly blind,
O now, to all mankind
Let there be light!

Spirit of truth and love,
Life-giving, holy Dove,
Speed forth thy flight;
Move on the water’s face,
Bearing the lamp of grace,
And in earth’s darkest place
Let there be light!

Here (with some feedback) is the International Choir of Notre-Dame Cathedral (CIC) of Ho Chi Minh-City (Vietnam) singing this hymn in opening of Pentecost Mass on June 3rd 2001. Here is a version for four clarinets. And here is the choir of the Norwich Cathedral.

John Marriott, M.A, son of E. Marriott, D.D., Rector of Cottesbach, near Lutterworth, was born at Cottesbach, in 1780, and educated at Rugby, and Christ Church, Oxford. He was the second of two who obtained honours in the schools in 1802, the first year in which there was a public examination for honours at Oxford. He was also Student of Christ Church, and for about two years a private tutor in the family of the Duke of Buccleuch. The Duke presented him to the Rectory of Church Lawford, Warwickshire. This he retained to his death, although his wife’s health compelled him to reside in Devonshire, where he was successively curate of St. Lawrence and other parishes in Exeter, and of Broadclyst, near Exeter, where he died March 31, 1825. (Hymnary)

Felice Giardini

The tune is MOSCOW, also known as ITALIAN HYMN, composed by Felice Giardini, (Turin, April 12, 1716 – Moscow, June 8, 1796), an Italian composer and violinist. Felice de Giardini (b. Turin, Italy, 1716; d. Moscow, Russia, 1796) composed ITALIAN HYMN in three parts for this text at the request of Selina Shirley, the famous evangelically minded Countess of Huntingdon. Giardini was living in London at the time and contributed this tune and three others to Martin Madan’s Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1769), published to benefit the Lock Hospital in London where Madan was chaplain.

Giardini achieved great musical fame throughout Europe, especially in England. He studied violin, harpsichord, voice, and composition in Milan and Turin; from 1748 to 1750 he conducted a very successful solo violin tour on the continent. He came to England in 1750 and for the next forty years lived in London, where he was a prominent violinist in several orchestras. Giardini also taught and composed operas and instrumental music. In 1784 he traveled to Italy, but when he returned to London in 1790, Giardini was no longer popular. His subsequent tour to Russia also failed, and he died there in poverty. (Hymnary)

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Blessed Jesus, at Thy word

Blessed Jesus, at Thy Word was written by Tobias Clausnitzer (1619-1684) and translated by Catherine Winkworth (1827-1828). It has many themes beloved of Lutherans: the Word of God is Himself the power that gathers us together to hear Him; the Word by his teaching draws our hearts to love Him; the Spirit prays within us with unutterable groans; we trust in the promise of God’s Word, and are therefore consoled.

Tobias Clausnitzer was born at Thum, near Annaberg, in Saxony, probably on Feb. 5,1619. After studying at various Universities, and finally at Leipzig (where he graduated M.A. in 1643), he was appointed, in 1644, chaplain to a Swedish regiment. In that capacity he preached the thanksgiving sermon in St. Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, on “Reminiscere” Sunday, 1645 (ii. Sunday in Lent) on the accession of Christina as Queen of Sweden; as also the thanksgiving sermon at the field service held by command of General Wrangel, at Weiden, in the Upper Palatine, on January 1, 1649, after the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia. In 1649 he was appointed first pastor at Weiden, and remained there (being also appointed later a member of the Consistory, and inspector of the district,) till his death, on May 7, 1684. (Hymnary)

Blessed Jesus, at Thy word
We are gathered all to hear Thee;
Let our hearts and souls be stirred
Now to seek and love and fear Thee,
By Thy teachings, sweet and holy,
Drawn from earth to love Thee solely.

All our knowledge, sense, and sight
Lie in deepest darkness shrouded
Till Thy Spirit breaks our night
With the beams of truth unclouded.
Thou alone to God canst win us;
Thou must work all good within us.

Glorious Lord, Thyself impart,
Light of Light, from God proceeding;
Open Thou our ears and heart,
Help us by Thy Spirit’s pleading;
Hear the cry Thy people raises,
Hear and bless our prayers and praises!

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Praise to Thee and adoration!
Grant that we Thy Word may trust
And obtain true consolation
While we here below must wander,
Till we sing Thy praises yonder.

Catherine Winkworth (13 September 1827 – 1 July 1878) was born at 20 Ely Place, Holborn, on the edge of the City of London. She was the fourth daughter of Henry Winkworth, a silk merchant. In 1829, her family moved to Manchester, where her father had a silk mill. Winkworth lived most of her early life in this great city, engine of the Industrial Revolution. Winkworth studied under the Rev. William Gaskell, minister of Cross Street Chapel, and with Dr. James Martineau, both of them eminent British Unitarians. She subsequently moved with the family to Clifton, near Bristol. Her sister Susanna Winkworth (1820–1884) was also a translator, mainly of German devotional works.Winkworth translated biographies of two founders of sisterhoods for the poor and the sick: Life of Pastor Fliedner, 1861, and Life of Amelia Sieveking, 1863.

She is best known for bringing the German chorale tradition to English speakers with her numerous translations of church hymns, which were published in the Lyra Germanica.

She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls and in promoting women’s rights, as the secretary of the Clifton Association for Higher Education for Women, and a supporter of the Clifton High School for Girls, where a school house is named after her, and a member of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She was likewise governor of the Red Maids’ School in Westbury-on-Trym in the city of Bristol.

According to the Encyclopedia of Britain by Bamber Gascoigne (1993), it was Catherine Winkworth who, learning of General Charles James Napier’s ruthless and unauthorised, but successful campaign to conquer the Indian province of Sindh, “remarked to her teacher that Napier’s despatch to the governor-general of India, after capturing Sindh, should have been Peccavi (Latin for ‘I have sinned’: a pun on ‘I have Sindh’). She sent her joke to the new humorous magazine Punch, which printed it on 18 May 1844. She was then sixteen years old. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations attributes this to Winkworth, noting that it was attributed to her in Notes and Queries in May 1954.The pun has usually been credited to Napier.] The rumour’s persistence over the decades led to investigations in Calcutta archives, as well as comments by William Lee-Warner in 1917 and Lord Zetland, Secretary for India, in 1936.

Catherine Winkworth died suddenly of heart disease near Geneva on 1 July 1878 and was buried in Monnetier, in Upper Savoy. A monument to her memory was erected in Bristol Cathedral. She is commemorated as a hymn writer with John Mason Neale on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church on 7 August.

The tune LIEBSTER JESU was composed by Johann Rudolf Ahle.

Johann Rudolph Ahle (1625 – 1673) was a German composer, organist, theorist, and Protestant church musician.

Ahle was born in Mühlhausen, Thuringia. While not much is known of his early musical training, he studied at the grammar school in Göttingen and then studied theology at the University of Erfurt from 1645 to 1649. In 1646 he became cantor at the Church of St. Andrew in Erfurt. In 1648 he published the Compendium per tenellis, a theoretical treatise on choral singing which was reprinted several times during his lifetime and for a last time 50 years later by his son Johann Georg (the last edition appeared in 1704).

In 1654 Ahle assumed the post of organist at the Church of St Blaise in Mühlhausen. The next year he married Anna Maria Wölfer; their son, Johann Georg Ahle (1651-1706), was also a well-known composer and organist. Johann Rudolph was elected a town councilman in Mühlhausen in the 1650s, and was elected mayor shortly before his death in 1673. His immediate successor at St. Blasen/Blasius was his son Johann Georg, and then briefly Johann Sebastian Bach, who was in Mühlhausen in 1707/08.

Much of his compositional output consists of sacred choral and vocal works, instrumental music, and organ music. He is best known for motets and sacred concertos (most of them in German, some in Latin) contained in Neu-gepflanzte Thüringische Lust-Garten, in welchem… Neue Geistliche Musicalische Gewaechse mit 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 und mehr Stimmen auf unterschiedliche Arten mit und ohne Instrument … versetzet (1657–65). He is also known for hymn melodies, of which three remain in the Evangelical Hymn Book. (Wikipedia)

Except for his collection of dances of 1650, Ahle’s large output of music consists entirely of sacred vocal works. On the whole it is interesting not because it is original but because it is typical of the music written for the Protestant Church in Thuringia and Saxony during the third quarter of the 17th century. Moreover, since Ahle and his son were the immediate predecessors of the young J.S. Bach, who as his first employment held the same position as they did at St Blasius, the state of music under them provides at least a few clues to some of the early influences on J.S. Bach’s style. Ahle was probably influenced by Michael Altenburg and especially by Hammerschmidt, who, though belonging to the generation of Heinrich Schütz, wrote simpler and more popular church music. He cultivated the simple style of the chorale, avoiding polyphonic counterpoint. Certainly the tendency towards popularization characterizes almost all of Ahle’s output. His tunes were for long very popular, and are still sung in the Protestant churches of Thuringia – amongst others that known as Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier. (Bach Cantata Website)

The tune is of surpassing sweetness; J. S. Bach used it in a cantata (BWV 373) and six choral preludes. Here is the cantata with choral prelude BWV 633, 634, etc. Here is a charming version of teh hymn by four siblings – Bach would have loved it.

Here is Albert Schweitzer in 1937 playing BWV 731 on the organ of the Église Sainte-Aurélie in Strasbourg (with an unusual video). And there are that and other preludes in unusual versions Here is Alicia de Laroccha (ah, I remember hearing her when we were both young). Here a lively version for piano and percussion. Here we have it on the flute and organ in Brazil. Here on four cellos. Here on guitar (rather nice). Here for a Japanese recorder ensemble. Here are the Swingle Singers. Here for saxophone, cello, and piano. Yes, here for accordion.

It is a lovely prelude, but I am astonished at how it has captured the popular imagination all over the world, really becoming a part of pop culture, like Durer’s Hands.

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Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old

Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old was written by Edward Hayes Plumptre (1821-1891), who wrote it for King’s College Hospital. It is a hymn for the sick, whether in body in mind. Unlike much Victorian writing about sickness, the hymn avoids mawkishness and strikes a positive note, with words such as ‘strong’, ‘calmed’, ‘almighty’, ‘deliverer’ and ‘soothe’ stressing both the power and gentleness of God. Like several of Plumptre’s other hymns, it achieves a strong sense of inclusiveness. The first verse describes the sick, with their various afflictions, coming together to seek healing from Jesus. The second verse draws in both those who are able to go about their business and the bedridden, ‘in crowded street, by restless couch’ and links them to those healed in the past ‘by Gennesareth’s shore’. In the third verse, both the healers and the sick ask for God’s help and support and take part together in praising him. This breadth of vision gives the hymn a strength which has ensured its enduring value. We should sing it especially for the sick of our congregation and thsoe in Joseph Richey Hospice, because jsus triumphs “o’er disease and death/ O’er darkness and the grave.”

In the original text, there was a penultimate verse emphasizing that miracles no longer happen, and healing takes place through scientific knowledge. This verse is generally dropped, but otherwise the hymn has not been much altered.

1 Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old
Was strong to heal and save;
It triumphed o’er disease and death,
O’er darkness and the grave.
To Thee they went, the blind, the deaf,
The palsied, and the lame,
The leper with his tainted life,
The sick with fevered frame.
2 And lo! Thy touch brought life and health,
Gave speech, and strength, and sight;
And youth renewed and frenzy calmed
Owned Thee, the Lord of light:
And now, O Lord, be near to bless,
Almighty as of yore,
In crowded street, by restless couch,
As by Gennesareth’s shore.
(3 Though love and might no longer heal
By touch, or word, or look;
Though they who do Thy work must read
Thy laws in nature’s book:
Yet come to heal the sick man’s soul
Come, cleanse the leprous taint;
Give joy and peace, where all is strife,
And strength, where all is faint.)
4 Be Thou our great deliverer still,
Thou Lord of life and death,
Restore and quicken, soothe and bless,
With thine almighty breath.
To hands that work and eyes that see,
Give wisdom’s heavenly lore,
That whole and sick, and weak and strong,
May praise Thee evermore,

Edward Hayes Plumptre

Edward Hayes Plumptre, D.D., was born in London, 1821, and educated at King’s College, London, and University College, Oxford, graduating as a double first in 1844. He was for some time Fellow of Brasenose. On taking Holy Orders in 1846 he rapidly attained to a foremost position as a Theologian and Preacher. His appointments have been important and influential, and include that of Assistant Preacher at Lincoln’s Inn; Select Preacher at Oxford; Professor of Pastoral Theology at King’s College, London; Dean of Queen’s, Oxford; Prebendary in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London; Professor of Exegesis of the New Testament in King’s College, London; Boyle Lecturer; Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint, Oxford; Examiner in the Theological schools at Oxford; Member of the Old Testament Company for the Revision of the A.V. of the Holy Scriptures; Rector of Pluckley, 1869; Vicar of Bickley, Kent, 1873; and Dean of Wells, 1881.

Dean Plumptre’s literary productions have been very numerous and important, and embrace the classics, history, divinity, biblical criticism, biography, and poetry. The list as set forth in Crockford’s Clerical Directory is very extensive. His poetical works include Lazarus, and Other Poems, 1864; Master and Scholar, 1866; Things New and Old, 1884; and translations of Sophocles, Æschylus, and Dante. As a writer of sacred poetry he ranks very high. His hymns are elegant in style, fervent in spirit, and broad in treatment. The subjects chosen are mainly those associated with the revived Church life of the present day, from the Processional at a Choral Festival to hospital work and the spiritual life in schools and colleges. The rhythm of his verse has a special attraction for musicians, its poetry for the cultured, and its stately simplicity for the devout and earnest-minded. The two which have attained to the most extensive use in Great Britain and America are: Rejoice, ye pure in heart,” and “Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old.” His translations from the Latin, many of which were made for the Hymnary, 1871 and 1872, are very good and musical, but they have not been used in any way in proportion to their merits.

The tune ST MATTHEW is attributed to William Croft, who was born in the year 1677 and received his musical education in the Chapel Royal, under Dr. Blow. In 1700 he was admitted a Gentleman Extraordinary of the Chapel Boyd; and in 1707, upon the decease of Jeremiah Clarke, he was appointed joint organist with his mentor, Dr. Blow. In 1709 he was elected organist of Westminster Abbey. This amiable man and excellent musician died in 1727, in the fiftieth year of his age. A very large number of Dr. Croft’s compositions remain still in manuscript.

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Anthems

Out of the deep I call to Thee, Thomas Tallis

Out from the deep I call to thee, O Lord hear my invocation. Thine ears bow down; incline to me and hear my lamentation. For if thou wilt our sins behold, that we have done from time to tide, O Lord, who then dare be so bold as in thy sight for to abide.

Nicolas Lebègue (1631 – 1702) was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was born in Laon and in the 1650s settled in Paris, quickly establishing himself as one of the best organists of the country. Lebègue was probably the first among French composers to introduce independent pedal parts in his pieces.

This hymn was written by John Ellerton on 6 October 1880 at the request of Godfrey Thring for inclusion in Frances Carey Brock’s Children’s Hymn Book, which appeared in the following year. It follows the characteristic Victorian pattern set by Cecil Frances Alexande of using specially written hymns to teach children the meaning of the various Christian Festivals or articles of the Creed.

The hymn is one of very few on the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The first verse contains a series of negatives: this is not the eschatological Christ in glory, nor the one entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. But in the second verse the secret is disclosed: the Lord is an infant. Here Ellerton imaginatively reinterprets Luke’s story. Mary’s breast is Christ’s earthly throne and the infant Saviour is now a guest, albeit a heavenly guest, in his Father’s earthly house. The third verse is not unlike an Italian Renaissance painting rendered into words, but towards the end of the verse the mention of Simeon recalls the ‘Nunc dimittis’*, and we return to the centre of Ellerton’s spiritual life, the services of the Church of England, which all his hymns were written to enhance.

1 Hail to the Lord who comes,
comes to his temple gate,
not with his angel host,
not in his kingly state:
no shouts proclaim him nigh,
no crowds his coming wait.

2 But borne upon the throne
of Mary’s gentle breast,
watched by her duteous love,
in her fond arms at rest;
thus to his Father’s house
he comes, the heavenly guest.

3 There Joseph at her side
in reverent wonder stands;
and, filled with holy joy,
old Simeon in his hands
takes up the promised child,
the glory of all lands.

(4 Hail to the great First-born,
whose ransom-price they pay,
the Son before all worlds,
the child of man to-day,
that he might ransom us
who still in bondage lay.)

5 O Light of all the earth,
thy children wait for thee:
come to thy temples here,
that we, from sin set free,
before thy Father’s face
may all presented be.

This hymn is a translation of corde natus ex parentis by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (ca. 348-ca. 413), The translation is by Sir Henry Williams Baker (1821-1877) based on John Mason Neale (1818-1866).

Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending he,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore!

O that Birth for ever blessèd,
When the Virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed his sacred face,
Evermore and evermore!

Christ, to thee with God the Father,
And, O Holy Ghost, to thee,
Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving,
And unwearied praises be:
Honour, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory,
Evermore and evermore!

The tune is DIVINUM MYSTERIUM, a plainchant from Piae Cantiones (1582) , although the tune is older. It originated as a Trope to the Sanctus and is found in tropers of the Middle Ages in Germany and Italy, sometimes with the words ‘Divinum Mysterium’. The tune has been effectively modernized, but retains the name.

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O gladsome light

O gladsome light is a translation by Robert Bridges (1844-1930) of the Phos hilaron. ‘Phos hilaron’ (‘joyful light’) is an ancient hymn originating in the early church and sung daily at Vespers (hesperinos) in the Byzantine liturgy of the hours. St. Basil the Great (d. 379) described it as ancient, in fact so old that he did not know who wrote it, and he equated it with thanksgiving for the light.

O for a heart to praise my God is by Charles Wesley (1707-1788). This hymn has the Wesleyan emphasis on the religion of the heart, which is transformed by the saving blood of Jesus. The hope for perfection is deeply Wesleyan. The Beatitudes likewise point the Christian to greater and greater perfection: Blessed are the pure of heart, blessed are the meek. Perfection is found in love, because we become sharers of the divine nature, and Jesus reveals the “new, best name” of God, Love.

1 O for a heart to praise my God,
a heart from sin set free;
a heart that’s sprinkled with the blood
so freely shed for me:

2 A heart resigned, submissive, meek,
my great Redeemer’s throne;
where only Christ is heard to speak,
where Jesus reigns alone:

3 A humble, lowly, contrite heart,
believing, true, and clean,
which neither life nor death can part
from Him that dwells within:

4 A heart in every thought renewed,
and full of love divine;
perfect and right and pure and good —
a copy, Lord, of Thine.

5 Thy nature, gracious Lord, impart,
come quickly from above;
write Thy new name upon my heart,
Thy new best name of Love.

Protestants, following Luther, tended to think that man was simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and a sinner. Luther used the Ten Commandments in his catechesis, but he thought the purpose of the Law was to show us that we were unable to obey it, and that we had to receive the unearned forgiveness of God. (He did not tell children that they were unable to obey the Commandments!) But Wesley thought that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the heart, the emotions, the deep well of our being, could be “strangely warmed” and that we could therefore attain to sinless perfection in this life. Jesus in the Beatitudes calls us to a high perfection, and above that perfection are the gifts of the Holy Spirit which supernaturalize human nature and help us to attain to participation in the divine nature, to divinization (theosis).

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Jesus, lead the way

Jesus, lead the way is a translation by the Episcopal clergyman Arthur W. Fandlander of the German hymn Jesu, geh’ voran, written by Nicolas Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf. It is a simple prayer for help in the difficulties and pains of life, and a reminder that the way of the cross leads home to God.

Nicolas Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf

The tune SEELENBRÄUTIGAM (The Bridegroom of the soul) is by Adam Drese (1620—1701). In 1697 he wrote Seelenbräutigam, Jesus, Gottes lamm. In 1721 Von Zinzendorf wrote Seelenbräutigam, o du Gottes Lamm, and set it to Drese’s melody, thereby leading to a confusion between the two hymns. Von Zinzendorf later wrote Jesu, geh voran, which is set to Drese’s tune, and it is a translation of this hymn that we use in the 1940 Hymnal.

Arthur William Farlander

The version in the 1940 Hymnal is the translation by Arthur William Farlander (1898—1952). Farlander was born in Germany. Sometime in his early life he moved to the United States and was confirmed as an Episcopalian in the 1920s. He was ordained in 1927. He was rector of a church in San Francisco, dean of St James Cathedral in Fresno, and later rector of churches in Santa Clara and Santa Rosa. He was on the twenty-four member committee which produced the 1940 Hymnal for which he helped translate six texts. He was a pioneer in Episcopal radio ministry.

Drese was at first musician at the court of Duke Wilhelm, of Sachse-Weimar; and after being sent by the Duke for further training under Marco Sacchi at Warsaw, was appointed his Kapellmeister in 1655. On the Duke’s death in 1662, his son, Duke Bernhard, took Drese with him to Jena, appointed him his secretary, and, in 1672, Town Mayor. After Duke Bernhard’s death, in 1678, Drese remained in Jena till 1683, when he was appointed Kapellmeister at Arnstadt to Prince Anton Günther of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, who required Drese to put aside secular music and concentrate on Pietist compositions. He died at Arnstadt shortly before J. S. Bach came there.

Jesus, led the way
Through our life’s long long day,
And with faithful footsteps steady,
We will follow, ever ready;
Guide us by Thy hand
To our fatherland.
Should our lot be hard,
Keep us on our guard;
Even through severest trial
Make us brave in self-denial
Transient pain may be,
But a way to Thee.

When we need relief,
From an inner grief,
Or when evils come alluring
Make us patient and enduring:
Let us follow still
Thy most holy will.

Order thou our ways,
When we need relief,
From an inner grief,
Or when evils come alluring
Make us patient and enduring:
Let us follow still
Thy most holy will.

Saviour, all our days:
Order thou our ways,
When we need relief,
From an inner grief,
Or when evils come alluring
Make us patient and enduring:
Let us follow still
Thy most holy will.

Schleiermacher also wrote a short hymn for this melody: Dienen Frieden gieb.

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Songs of thankfulness and praise

Songs of Thankfulness and Praise was written by Christopher Wordsworth. He described it as “recapitulation of the successive manifestations of Christ, which have already been presented in the services of the former weeks throughout the season of Epiphany; and anticipation of that future great and glorious Epiphany, at which Christ will be manifest to all, when he will appear again to judge the world.” Through his miracles, his acts, Jesus manifests his nature, and gives us a foretaste of the time when he will finally reveal himself and come to heal the world of all evil, all sickness, and of death itself.

1. Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesus, Lord, to Thee we raise,
Manifested by the star
To the sages from afar;
Branch of royal David’s stem
In Thy birth at Bethlehem;
Anthems be to Thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.

2. Manifest at Jordan’s stream,
Prophet, Priest, and King supreme,
And at Cana, Wedding-guest,
In Thy Godhead manifest;
Manifest in power divine,
Changing water into wine.
Anthems be to Thee addressed
God in man made manifest.

3. Manifest in making whole
Palsied limbs and fainting soul;
Manifest in valiant fight,
Quelling all the devil’s might;
Manifest in gracious will,
Ever bringing good from ill.
Anthems be to Thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.

4. Sun and moon shall darkened be,
Stars shall fall, the heavens shall flee;
Christ will then like lightning shine,
All will see His glorious sign;
All will then the trumpet hear,
All will see the Judge appear;
Thou by all wilt be confessed,
God in man made manifest.

5. Grant us grace to see Thee, Lord,
Mirrored in Thy holy Word;
May we imitate Thee now
And be pure as pure art Thou
That we like to Thee may be
At Thy great Epiphany
And may praise Thee, ever blest,
God in man made manifest.

Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885) was the nephew of the poet William Wordsworth. Christopher Wordsworth was an athlete, classicist, poet, and Anglican bishop of Lincoln, to which position he was appointed by Disraeli.

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Anthems

How beautiful are the feet of them, G. F. Handel

How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things.

Robert Parsons was composing during a period of major religious upheaval in England. After the death of Henry VIII in 1547, the new King Edward VI advanced the Reformation in England, introducing major changes to the liturgy of the Church of England. In 1549, Thomas Cranmer’s new Book of Common Prayer swept away the old Latin liturgy and replaced it with prayers in English. This brand new liturgy suddenly demanded that new music should be written for the church in English, and musicians of the Chapel Royal such as Thomas Tallis, John Sheppard, and Robert Parsons were called upon to demonstrate that the new Protestantism was no less splendid than the old Catholic religion. During the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–1558), a revival of Catholic practice encouraged a return to Latin music, but after Elizabeth I ascended to the throne of England in 1558, vernacular English liturgy and music came back into favour.

Parsons is especially noted for his choral motets, and he is recognised as a master of polyphonic writing for choirs with his skilled use of cantus firmus within his works. Notable works include his setting of the Ave Maria.

Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748) was a German music theorist, organist, composer, and lexicographer of the Baroque era. Not only was his life almost exactly contemporaneous to that of Johann Sebastian Bach, he was the famous composer’s cousin.

Edward Caswall (1814—1878) was an Anglican clergyman. In 1850, his wife having died the previous year, he joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri under the future Cardinal Newman, to whose influence his conversion to Roman Catholicism was due.

He was the son of Rev. R. C. Caswall, sometime Vicar of Yateley, Hampshire. Caswall was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1836 with honours and later proceeded to Master of Arts. He was curate of Stratford-sub-Castle, near Salisbury, 1840–1847. In 1850, he joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri. He died at the Oratory, Edgbaston, near Birmingham on 2 January 1878 and was buried at Rednal, near Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.

He wrote original poems that have survived mainly in Catholic hymnals due to a clear adherence to Catholic doctrine. Caswall is best known for his translations from the Roman Breviary and other Latin sources, which are marked by faithfulness to the original. His widely used hymn texts and translations include “Alleluia! Alleluia! Let the Holy Anthem Rise”; “Come, Holy Ghost”; “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee”; “When Morning Gilds the Skies”; and “Ye Sons and Daughters of the Lord.”

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Jesus calls us; o’er the tumult is by Cecil Frances Alexander. It contains a revivalist note which was also part of the Oxford Movement, which emphasized the Catholic nature of the Church of England in order to call men to conversion and a holy life.

Cecil Frances Alexander (1818-1895) was born in Dublin. She began writing verse in her childhood, being strongly influenced by Dr Walter Hook, Dean of Chichester. Her subsequent religious work was strongly influenced by her contacts with the Oxford Movement, and in particular with John Keble, who edited one of her anthologies. Some of her hymns, e.g. “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, “There is a Green Hill Far Away” and the Christmas carol “Once in Royal David’s City”, are known by Christians the world over, as is her rendering of “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate”.

Alexander was involved in charitable work for much of her life. Money from her first publications had helped build the Derry and Raphoe Diocesan Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, which was founded in Strabane in 1846. The profits from Hymns for Little Children were also donated to the school. She was involved with the Derry Home for Fallen Women, and worked to develop a district nurses service. She was an “indefatigable visitor to poor and sick.” She was criticized, however, for her endorsement of the class system, as expressed, for example, in the original third verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

Subsequent versions of the hymn omitted this verse.

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Praise to the living God, like many hymns, has a complicated textual history.

1 Praise to the living God!
All praised be his Name
who was, and is, and is to be,
for ay the same.
The one eternal God
ere aught that now appears:
the first, the last, beyond all thought
his timeless years!

2 Formless, all lovely forms
declare his loveliness;
holy, no holiness of earth
can his express.
Lo, he is Lord of all.
Creation speaks his praise,
and everywhere above, below,
his will obeys.

3 His Spirit floweth free,
high surging where it will:
in prophet’s word he spake of old:
he speaketh still.
Established is his law,
and changeless it shall stand,
deep writ upon the human heart,
on sea, on land.

4 Eternal life hath he
implanted in the soul;
his love shall be our strength and stay
while ages roll.
Praise to the living God!
All praised be his Name
who was, and is, and is to be,
for aye the same.

“Praise to the Living God” is an American Judeo-Christian hymn written in 1884 by Max Landsburg and Newton Mann. It was revised in 1910 by William C. Gannett.

Landsburg was a Jewish rabbi of German origin in Rochester, New York. In 1884, he approached Mann, a Unitarian minister, for assistance in adapting the British Methodist hymn “The God of Abraham Praise,” itself a loose and Christianized translation of the Jewish hymn “Yigdal,” into a more accurate and less Christianized translation of “Yigdal” for interfaith use. Mann wrote “Praise to the Living God” as a version of Yigdal that was suitable for use in both Jewish and Christian worship. However, in 1910, William C. Gannett was approached by Landsburg to revise the hymn. A revision was subsequently completed, despite Gannett claiming it was not his work, and the revised hymn first appeared in the Jewish Union Hymnal in the same year.

“Praise to The Living God” and its lyrics have often been combined with other hymns to create hybrids. In the 1930s, for example, “The God of Abraham Praise” was sung to a melody called “Leoni” which was composed by Myer Lyon and adopted by Thomas Olivers as the music for the hymn. In 1933, the editors of The Presbyterian Hymnal decided to replace “The God of Abraham Praise” with “Praise to The Living God” in the hymnal. In order to make the new hymn familiar to the congregation, they set it to the tune of the old hymn and substituted the first line of the old with the first line of the new. Consequently, several American hymnals until the 1980s misattributed “The God of Abraham Praise” to Landsburg and Mann instead of crediting Olivers.

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Anthems

Lord, for thy tender mercy’s sake, Richard Ferrant

Lord, for thy tender mercy’s sake, lay not our sins to our charge, but forgive that is past, and give us grace to amend our sinful lives. To decline from sin and incline to virtue, that we may walk in a perfect heart before thee, now and evermore. Amen.

English musician, organist, choirmaster, and producer of plays, Richard Farrant was attached to the Chapel Royal, though not continuously, from the reign of Edward VI until he died in 1580. In 1564, he was appointed master of the Choristers and organist at St George’s Chapel. In 1576 he was appointed deputy to William Hunnis, Director of the Children of the Chapel Royal. His Morning, Communion, and Evening service (à 4) in A minor survives also in G minor. The fine short anthems Call to remembrance and Hide not thou thy face help to give Farrant a place in the musical history of the period out of proportion to his small output. Lord, for thy tender mercies’sake, sometimes ascribed to Farrant is more likely by Tye, or the elder John Hilton (d. 1608). Farrant converted Blackfriars, the old monastery, into a private theatre in 1574.

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From time to time the clergy notice the lack of men in the church; the clergy even propose that “something must be done.” It never is.

In their triennial Pastoral Letter, issued in 1856, the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States point with alarm:

“We proceed to notice a third defect, which it rests upon the Laity to rectify, and this lies in the all-important work of male education. It is a mournful and alarming fact, that, as a general rule, boys are found so much fewer in number than girls, in all our Sunday schools; and that, for the most part, females exceed the males at the sacred rite of Confirmation, in the proportion of three to one. There can be no other reason for this, than the want of due attention to their training. If the fathers of our families were careful to set their sons a religious example, and if [16/17] our schools for boys were conducted, as they ought to be, on true Christian principles, it would be impossible that such a reproachful disinclination to the plain duties of youth could exist in the Church of God. The limits of this address do not allow us to discuss the subject as it deserves; but we could not pass it by without recommending it to your most earnest and prayerful reflection, in the full belief that the lack of religious reverence, amongst the males of the rising generation, is the most dangerous, increasing, and prolific evil of our day. Indeed, we do not hesitate to say, that if it be not effectually checked by the adoption of a higher rule of duty in families and schools, it is enough, of itself, to insure the final decay of the Church, and the certain ruin of the Nation.”

The bishops were correct; the alienation of men from the churches explains, I think, much of the dynamic of secularization. And perhaps this letter helped encourage the foundation of the preparatory schools for boys which helped transmit the faith to at least some boys.

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In their Pastoral Letter of 1874, the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States expressed their teaching on the matter of the communion of the divorced and remarried:

How is it, then, that some among you have presumed to put away a wife except for the cause of fornication? We are distressed to know that some, under pretext of a civil divorce, have without adequate cause dismissed an uncongenial wife or husband, and after marrying another have profaned the Holy Sacrament by coming to it with a body thus defiled.

Be ye well assured, brethren beloved, that whatever license may be tolerated by society and by civil courts if any persons be joined together otherwise than as God’s Word doth allow, their marriage is not lawful. Be admonished that if any cleave not to his wife, but unlawfully marries another, and then comes to the Table of the Lord, although he doth carnally and visibly press with his teeth (as St. Augustine saith) the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, yet in no wise is he partaker of Christ, but rather to his own condemnation, doth eat and drink the sign or Sacrament of so great a thing.

Robert Bridges (1844-1930) was poet laureate of England from 1913 until his death. At Oxford he was a friend of Gerald Manley Hopkins and arranged for the publication of Hopkins’ poetry posthumously.

Bridges wrote and also translated historic hymns, and many of these were included in Songs of Syon (1904) and the later English Hymnal (1906). Several of Bridges’ hymns and translations are still in use today, such as “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hilaron), “O Sacred Head, sore wounded” (Paulus Gerhardt, 1656), and
“When morning gilds the skies” (stanza 3; Katholisches Gesangbuch, 1744)

PUER NOBIS NASCITUR is a melody from a fifteenth-century manuscript from Trier. However, the tune probably dates from an earlier time and may even have folk roots. PUER NOBIS was altered in Spangenberg’s Christliches Gesangbuchlein (1568), in Petri’s famous Piae Cantiones (1582), and again in Praetorius’s Musae Sioniae (Part VI, 1609), which is the basis for the triple-meter version.

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Father, we thank Thee who hast planted isa paraphrase by the Episcopal clergyman Francis Bland Tucker (1895—1984) of the Didache, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, one of the earliest documents of the church.

Stanza 1 corresponds to 10: 2 of the Didache, a post-communion prayer: ‘We give Thee thanks, Holy Father, for Thy holy name, which Thou hast made to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality, which Thou hast made known unto us through Thy Son Jesus’ (translation by Joseph Barber Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, 1891). Stanza 2 is from 10: 3: ‘Thou, Almighty Master, didst create all things for Thy name’s sake, and didst give food and drink unto men for enjoyment, that they might render thanks to Thee; but didst bestow upon us spiritual food and drink and eternal life through Thy Son.’ Stanza 3 is from 10: 5: ‘Remember, Lord, Thy Church to deliver it from all evil and to perfect it in Thy love…’. Stanza 4 is from 9: 4: ‘As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and being gathered together became one, so may Thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Thy kingdom.’

Father, we thank Thee who hast planted
Thy holy name within our hearts.
Knowledge and faith and life immortal
Jesus, Thy Son, to us imparts.
Thou, Lord, didst make all for Thy pleasure,
Didst give us food for all our days,
Giving in Christ the Bread eternal;
Thine is the pow’r, be Thine the praise.

Watch o’er Thy Church, O Lord, in mercy,
Save it from evil, guard it still,
Perfect it in Thy love, unite it,
Cleansed and conformed unto Thy will.
As grain, once scattered on the hillsides,
Was in this broken bread made one,
So from all lands Thy Church be gather’d
Into Thy kingdom by Thy Son.

Francis Bland Tucker (1885-1984) was an important figure in hymnody. He was educated at the University of Virginia and the Virginia Theological Seminary. Beginning in 1945, he was Rector of Christ Church in Savannah, Georgia. Tucker served on the two commissions, forty-two years apart, that revised hymnals of the Episcopal Church. He worked on the 1940 Hymnal and the 1982 Hymnal which includes 17 of Tucker’s contributions. Among these are the texts, Oh, Gracious Light (Hymns 25-26), Father, We Thank Thee Who Hast Planted (Hymns 302-303), and his original text, Our Father, by Whose Name (Hymn 587). Only John Mason Neale is credited with more items in the 1982 Hymnal. Tucker was also a theological adviser to the commission that produced the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

A collateral descendant of George Washington, Tucker’s parents were Beverley Dandridge Tucker, Episcopal Bishop of Southern Virginia, and Anna Maria Washington who was one of the last children to be born at Mount Vernon. Francis Bland is the brother of Henry St. George Tucker (1874–1959), 19th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and descendant of St. George Tucker (1752–1827), lawyer, legal scholar, state and federal judge for whom the St. George Tucker House in Colonial Williamsburg is named.

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One night in London, Thomas Olivers (1725—1799), a follower of John Wesley, was attracted to a service in a Jewish synagogue, where he heard a great singer, Myer Leoni, sing an ancient Hebrew text in solemn, plaintive mode. Olivers wrote a hymn to that tune: The God of Abraham Praise, which is a paraphrase of the ancient Hebrew Yigdal, or doxology. In the 12th century, Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides codified the 13 articles of the Jewish Creed. These articles of the Jewish faith were later shaped into the Yigdal around 1400 by Daniel ben Judah, a judge in Rome.

Here are the original verses. Note that in almost all hymnals the specifically Christian references have been removed, often to make the hymn suitable for interfaith gatherings.

The God of Abraham praise, who reigns enthroned above;
Ancient of everlasting days, and God of Love;
Jehovah, great I AM! by earth and Heav’n confessed;
I bow and bless the sacred Name forever blessed.

The God of Abraham praise, at Whose supreme command
From earth I rise—and seek the joys at His right hand;
I all on earth forsake, its wisdom, fame, and power;
And Him my only Portion make, my Shield and Tower.

The God of Abraham praise, whose all sufficient grace
Shall guide me all my happy days, in all my ways.
He calls a worm His friend, He calls Himself my God!
And He shall save me to the end, thro’ Jesus’ blood.

He by Himself has sworn; I on His oath depend,
I shall, on eagle wings upborne, to Heav’n ascend.
I shall behold His face; I shall His power adore,
And sing the wonders of His grace forevermore.

Tho’ nature’s strength decay, and earth and hell withstand,
To Canaan’s bounds I urge my way, at His command.
The wat’ry deep I pass, with Jesus in my view;
And thro’ the howling wilderness my way pursue.

The goodly land I see, with peace and plenty bless’d;
A land of sacred liberty, and endless rest.
There milk and honey flow, and oil and wine abound,
And trees of life forever grow with mercy crowned.

There dwells the Lord our King, the Lord our righteousness,
Triumphant o’er the world and sin, the Prince of peace;
On Sion’s sacred height His kingdom still maintains,
And glorious with His saints in light forever reigns.

He keeps His own secure, He guards them by His side,
Arrays in garments, white and pure, His spotless bride:
With streams of sacred bliss, with groves of living joys—
With all the fruits of Paradise, He still supplies.

Before the great Three-One they all exulting stand;
And tell the wonders He hath done, through all their land:
The list’ning spheres attend, and swell the growing fame;
And sing, in songs which never end, the wondrous Name.

The God Who reigns on high the great archangels sing,
And “Holy, holy, holy!” cry, “Almighty King!
Who was, and is, the same, and evermore shall be:
Jehovah—Father—great I AM, we worship Thee!”

Before the Savior’s face the ransomed nations bow;
O’erwhelmed at His almighty grace, forever new:
He shows His prints of love—they kindle to a flame!
And sound thro’ all the worlds above the slaughtered Lamb.

Exalted be the Living God and praised, He exists – unbounded by time is His existence;

He is One – and there is no unity like His Oneness – Inscrutable and infinite is His Oneness;

He has no semblance of a body nor is He corporeal – nor has His holiness any comparison;

He preceded every being that was created – the First, and nothing precedes His precedence;

Behold! He is Master of the universe – Every creature demonstrates His greatness and His sovereignty;

He granted His flow of prophecy – to His treasured, splendid people;

In Israel, none like Moses arose again – a prophet who perceived His vision clearly;

God gave His people a Torah of truth – by means of His prophet, the most trusted of His household;

God will never amend nor exchange His law – for any other one, for all eternity;

He scrutinizes and knows our hiddenmost secrets – He perceives a matter’s outcome at its inception;

He recompenses man with kindness according to his deed – He places evil on the wicked according to his wickedness;

By the End of Days He will send our Messiah – to redeem those longing for His final salvation;

God will revive the dead in His abundant kindness – Blessed forever is His praised Name.

Note that the last verse expresses belief in the resurrection of the dead, which is an article of Jewish belief, as is clear from Gospels.

Thomas Olivers

Thomas Olivers was born in 1725. Both his father and his mother died when he was four years old. He grew up to be an apprentice shoemaker and he became a profligate and reckless young man. After his involvement in a scandal which forced him to leave his home, Olivers travelled to Bristol where he heard George Whitfield preach on the text “is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” (Zechariah 3:2). Olivers was converted and expressed a desire to follow Whitfield; however one of Whitfield’s preachers discouraged him and instead he joined the Methodist society and met one of the founders of Methodism, John Wesley.

After joining Wesley as a preacher, Olivers was initially stationed to preach in Cornwall. He was later stationed to preach all around Great Britain and Ireland because of his fearless preaching style. He also had good relations with Great Britain’s Jewish community, attending Jewish synagogues and became friends with Rabbi Myer Lyon. In 1775, Wesley appointed Olivers to co-write the Arminian Magazine with him. Olivers often exercised control over the content of the magazine. Due to a lack of formal education, Olivers’ editions of the magazine contained several printing errors, which annoyed Wesley but he persevered with Olivers whom he counted as a friend and attached a list of errors at the back of the yearly annual in 1778. However following an “astounding number of errata”, Wesley declared in a letter that “I cannot, dare not, will not suffer Thomas Olivers to murder the Arminian Magazine any longer. The errata are intolerable and innumerable. They shall be so no more” and removed Olivers from his position in 1789. Despite this, Olivers and Wesley remained good friends, often viewed as a father-son relationship. When Olivers died in March 1799, he was buried in Wesley’s grave in London.

He wrote choral works, songs, chamber music, oratorios, cantatas, masses, as well as works for orchestra and for the organ, totaling several hundred works. He was choir director of Gyór Cathedral and also held the position of professor at the Theological College and the State Conservatory. As a violinist, he was one of the early members of The New Hungarian Quartet.

Here the anthem by mixed chamber choir; here at the Christ the King mass at St. Peter’s in Rome; here by a male choir at Đakova cathedral in Croatia.

Halmos was born a subject of Franz Josef in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lived through the Red Terror of Béla Kun, the regency of Admiral Horthy, the takeover by the Germans, and Communist era, including the Revolution of 1956. He lived to see a free Hungary. America’s political difficulties should be kept in perspective.

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O taste and see, Ralph Vaughan Williams

O taste and see how gracious the Lord is; blest is the man that trusteth in Him.

Martin Edward Fallas Shaw (1875 – 1958) was an English composer, conductor and (in his early life) theatre producer. His over 300 published works include songs, hymns, carols, oratorios, several instrumental works, a congregational mass setting (the Anglican Folk Mass) and four operas including a ballad opera.

He was the son of the Bohemian and eccentric James Shaw, composer of church music and organist of Hampstead Parish Church. He was the elder brother of the composer and influential educator Geoffrey Shaw and the actor Julius Shaw, whose career was cut short by the First World War – he was killed in March 1918. He studied under Stanford at the Royal College of Music, together with a generation of composers that included Holst, Vaughan Williams and John Ireland. He then embarked upon a career as a theatrical producer, composer and conductor, the early years of which he described as “a long period of starving along”. However, he began his career as an organist, serving at Emmanuel Church, West Hampstead, from 1895 to 1903.

Working with Percy Dearmer, Martin was music editor of The English Carol Book (1913, 1919) and, with Ralph Vaughan Williams, of Songs of Praise (1925, 1931) and The Oxford Book of Carols (1928). His tune Little Cornardis sung to Hills of the North Rejoice, and Marching is sung to Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow. While doing research for the English Hymnal (1906) in the British Library, he came upon the traditional Gaelic hymn-tune Bunessan in L. McBean’s Songs and Hymns of the Gael, published in 1900. However, the tune was not included in the English Hymnal. It was used instead in the second edition of Songs of Praise (1931), set to the poem Morning Has Broken, which Martin Shaw commissioned specially from his old friend Eleanor Farjeon. This tune and words became a No. 1 hit for Cat Stevens in 1972. Martin Shaw also noted down the Czech carol Rocking and included it in The Oxford Book of Carols.

Dear brothers and sisters,
the glory of the Lord has shone upon us,
and shall ever be manifest among us,
until the day of his return.

Through the rhythms of times and seasons
let us celebrate the mysteries of salvation.

Let us recall the year’s culmination,
the Easter Triduum of the Lord:
his last supper, his crucifixion, his burial,
and his rising celebrated
between the evening of the Twenty-ninth of March
and the evening of the Thirty-first of March,
Easter Sunday being on the First day of April.

Each Easter — as on each Sunday —
the Holy Church makes present the great and saving deed
by which Christ has for ever conquered sin and death.
From Easter are reckoned all the days we keep holy.

Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent,
will occur on the Fourteenth Day of February.

The Ascension of the Lord will be commemorated on
Sunday, the Thirteenth of May or Thursday, the Tenth day of May.

Pentecost, joyful conclusion of the season of Easter,
will be celebrated on the Twentieth day of May.

And, this year the First Sunday of Advent will be
on the Second day of December, 2018.

Likewise the pilgrim Church proclaims the passover of Christ
in the feasts of the holy Mother of God,
in the feasts of the Apostles and Saints,
and in the commemoration of the faithful departed.

To Jesus Christ, who was, who is, and who is to come,
Lord of time and history,
be endless praise, for ever and ever.

Amen.

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Prelude

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Hymns

As with gladness men of old is a prayer for God’s presence in our lives as we draw closer to Him. The Magi showed faith in God and eagerness, as well as sacrifice, in their journey to see the Christ-child. So may we live as though we really believe and eagerly look forward to the day when we shall one day see Him. In the third stanza, the gifts of the Magi are not even named. The Magi took the trouble to bring “gifts most rare” on a long journey. So may we “All our costliest treasures bring, Christ, to Thee, our heavenly King.” This pilgrimage is not easy, so we sing, “Holy Jesus, every day keep us in the narrow way,” remembering that Jesus said, “For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:14, ESV).

1 As with gladness men of old
did the guiding star behold;
as with joy they hailed its light,
leading onward, beaming bright;
so, most gracious God, may we
evermore be led to Thee.

2 As with joyful steps they sped
to that lowly cradle-bed,
there to bend the knee before
Him whom heav’n and earth adore;
so may we with willing feet
ever seek Thy mercy-seat.

3 As they offered gifts most rare
at that cradle rude and bare;
so may we with holy joy,
pure, and free from sin’s alloy,
all our costliest treasures bring,
Christ, to Thee, our heav’nly King.

4 Holy Jesus, ev’ry day
keep us in the narrow way;
and, when earthly things are past,
bring our ransomed lives at last
where they need no star to guide,
where no clouds Thy glory hide.

5 In that heav’nly country bright
need they no created light;
Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown,
Thou its Sun which goes not down;
there for ever may we sing
alleluias to our King.

William Chatterton Dix (1837 – 1898) was an English writer of hymns and carols. He was born in Bristol, the son of John Dix, a local surgeon, who wrote The Life of Chatterton the poet, whence the son’s middle name. William was educated at the Grammar School, Bristol, for a mercantile career, and became manager of a maritime insurance company in Glasgow where he spent most of his life.

In 1859 he was struck with a severe illness and was unable to attend Epiphany services; instead he wrote As with Gladness Men of Old. In addition to As with Gladness Men of Old, his hymns What Child Is This? and Alleluia! Sing to Jesus appear in the 1940 Hymnal.

This hymn is always sung to the tune DIX. Conrad Kocher, a German composer and church musician, originally wrote a longer version of this tune for a German chorale, “Treuer Heiland, wir sind hier,” which was published in 1838. William H. Monk omitted one phrase and altered a few notes of Kocher’s tune to fit “As With Gladness” for the 1861 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, for which he was music editor. Even though Dix did not like the choice of this tune, it goes so well with the text that it now bears his name. DIX is a simple bar form tune (AAB) with a wavelike contour in each of its three lines.

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What star is this is a translation by John Chandler of Quae stellae sole pulchrior/corruscat? by Charles Coffin.

What star is this, with beams so bright,
More beauteous than the noonday light?
It shines to herald forth the King,
And Gentile to His crib to bring.

True spake the prophet from a-far
Who told the rise of Jacob’s star:
And eastern sages with amaze
Upon the wondrous token gaze.

The guiding star above is bright:
Within them shines a clearer light,
And leads them on with power benign
To seek the Giver of the sign.

Their love can brook no dull delay;
Though toil nor danger block the way
Home, kindred, father land and all
They leave at their Creator’s call.

O Jesus, while the star of grace
Impels us on to seek thy face,
Let not our slothful hearts refuse
The guidance of thy light to use.

To God the Father, heav’nly Light,
To Christ, revealed in earthly night,
To God the Holy Ghost we raise
Our equal and unceasing praise.

John Chandler (1806 – 1876) was the son of the vicar of Witley. John was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BA 1827, MA 1830). He took Holy Orders, becoming a Fellow of his College and curate of Witley. He became vicar of Witley in 1839, remaining there until his death. He is chiefly known for The Hymns of the Primitive Church, published in 1837 (a later edition, with additional hymns, appeared as The Hymns of the Church, mostly Primitive, in 1841).

In the Preface to The Hymns of the Primitive Church, Chandler wrote:

It has long struck me, indeed, that as our Liturgy is compiled, in a great measure, from ancient materials, so, if there were any ancient hymns still extant, of the same date and character with the prayers, they would be most suitable for our purpose; for they would, from their antiquity, carry more weight with them than any modern ones could do…

He disapproved of ‘those rhyming jingling hymns which are found in the Popish missals, as barbarous in their Latinity, as defective in their doctrine’. He then described how he had found the deliberately unmetrical translations (by Isaac Williams*) in the British Magazine of hymns from the Paris Breviary of 1736, got hold of a copy, and proceeded to translate some of them again in a manner suited to congregational singing. In his orotund way, Chandler addressed himself with heavy playfulness to the Church of England:

It will not, I trust, be unpleasing or unedifying to her members to see a Morning hymn by a Bishop of Milan of the fourth century [Ambrose] joined to one on the same subject by a Bishop of Salisbury of the seventeenth. Perhaps, if the authorities of our Church carry on the design, we may see next to them a hymn by a Bishop of Calcutta of the nineteenth.

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Charles Coffin

Charles Coffin (1676 – 1749 ) was a French teacher, writer and Jansenist who was Rector of the University of Paris. Among his writings are a number of hymns which have been translated into English. In 1701, he was appointed chief assistant to Charles Rollin, principal of the Collège de Beauvais. He succeeded Rollin as principal in 1712. In 1718. he became rector of the University of Paris, a post which he held until his death.

Coffin published in 1727 some of his Latin poems, for which he was already noted, and in 1736 the bulk of his hymns appeared in the Paris Breviary of that year, an edition of which was published in 1838 at Oxford by John Henry Newman. 1736 also saw the publication of Coffin’s Hymni Sacri Auctore Carolo Coffin.

The Hymni Sacri included a poem adapted from the original chant, Jordanis oras prævia, which Rev. John Chandler later translated to the hymn On Jordan’s Bank the Baptist’s Cry set to the tune Winchester New for use at Matins during Advent. Chandler also translated Coffin’s The Advent of Our King.

Among his other works is an ode in praise of the wines of Champagne. This work is a version of a similar poem in which Bénigne Grenan, professor at Harcourt College, praised the pre-eminence of Burgundy wine, and that one of Charles Coffin’s Jansenist friends, Marc-Antoine Hersan, had had fun reciting one evening at a dinner.

While the papal bull Unigenitus condemned Jansenism, many in France interpreted it as an attack on the perogatives of the French church. The University of Paris and the provincial Parlements were hotbeds of opposition. The University was known to harbor Jansenist sympathizers; the Parlement of Paris went so far as to threatened to confiscate the temporalities of the Archbishop. As rector of the University and clerk to the Parlement of Paris, even Coffin’s hymns were viewed by some with suspicion.

Coffin died of pneumonia in Paris 20 June 1749. Due to his persistence in appealing against the apostolic constitution Unigenitus, under instructions from the Archbishop, who wished to make an example, the parish rector of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, refused to administer last rites to him, or give him a Christian burial ] Four thousand Parisians joined the funeral procession. Because the crown had supported the suppression of the Jansenists, Danton notes that the religious rite took on political overtones. The Parlement of Paris subsequently issued an official and strong “remonstrance” to the king. Richard J. Janet sees the resulting popular demonstrations as contributing to the growing disenchantment with the monarchy that would later play into the coming Revolution.

Praetorius also harmonized this tune, puer nobis nascitur. It probably predates him and may have folk origins.

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Songs of thankfulness and praise was written by Christopher Wordsworth, who described it as “recapitulation of the successive manifestations of Christ…and anticipation of that future great and glorious Epiphany, at which Christ will be manifest to all, when He will appear again to judge the world.” Note that the stanza “Sun and moon shall darkened be” omitted in the 1940 Hymnal. In many of the hymns of Advent and Christmas, references to the Second Coming, with its wonders and terrors, are usually toned down or omitted.

Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesus, Lord, to thee we raise,
Manifested by the star
To the sages from afar;
Branch of royal David’s stem
In thy birth at Bethlehem;
Anthems be to thee addressed,
God in Man made manifest.

Manifest at Jordan’s stream,
Prophet, Priest, and King supreme;
And at Cana, wedding-guest,
In thy Godhead manifest;
Manifest in power divine,
Changing water into wine;
Anthems be to thee addressed,
God in Man made manifest.

Manifest in making whole
Palsied limbs and fainting soul;
Manifest in valiant fight,
Quelling all the devil’s might;
Manifest in gracious will,
Ever bringing good from ill;
Anthems be to thee addressed,
God in Man made manifest.

Sun and moon shall darkened be,
Stars shall fall, the heavens shall flee,
Christ will then like lightning shine,
All will see his glorious sign:
All will then the trumpet hear;
All will see the Judge appear;
Thou by all wilt be confessed,
God in Man made manifest.

Grant us grace to see thee, Lord,
Mirrored in thy holy word;
May we imitate thee now,
And be pure, as pure art thou;
That we like to thee may be
At thy great Epiphany;
And may praise thee, ever blest,
God in Man made manifest.

Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1885) was the nephew of the poet William Wordsworth. Christopher Wordsworth was an athlete, classicist, poet, and Anglican bishop of Lincoln, to which he was appointed by Disraeli.

He was born at Lambeth (of which parish his father was then the rector) the youngest son of Christopher Wordsworth, afterwards Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was educated at Winchester, where he distinguished himself both as a scholar and as an athlete. In 1826 he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1830 graduated as Senior Classic in the Classical Tripos, and 14th Senior Optime in the Mathematical, won the First Chancellor’s Medal for classical studies, and was elected Fellow of Trinity.

Dr. Wordsworth, like the Wesleys, looked upon hymns as a valuable means of stamping permanently upon the memory the great doctrines of the Christian Church. He held it to be “the first duty of a hymn-writer to teach sound doctrine, and thus to save souls.” He thought that the materials for English Church hymns should be sought (1) in the Holy Scriptures, (2) in the writings of Christian Antiquity, and (3) in the Poetry of the Ancient Church. Hisown hymns more nearly resemble those of the Eastern, as may be seen by comparing The Holy Year with Dr. Mason Neale’s Hymns of the Eastern Church translated, with Notes, &c. The reason of this perhaps half-unconscious resemblance is not far to seek. Christopher Wordsworth, like the Greek hymnwriters, drew his inspiration from Holy Scripture, and he loved, as they did, to interpret Holy Scripture mystically. He thought that ”the dangers to which the Faith of England (especially in regard to the Old Testament) was exposed, arose from the abandonment of the ancient Christian, Apostolic and Patristic system of interpretation of the Old Testament for the frigid and servile modern exegesis of the literalists, who see nothing in the Old Testament but a common history, and who read it (as St. Paul says the Jews do) ‘with a veil on their heart, which veil’ (he adds) ‘is done away in Christ.’” In the same spirit, he sought and found Christ everywhere in the New Testament. The Gospel History was only the history of what “Jesus began to do and to teach” on earth; the Acts of the Apostles and all the Epistles were the history of what he continued to do and to teach from Heaven; and the Apocalypse (perhaps his favorite book) was “the seal and colophon of all.”

Here is the little door, lift up the latch, oh lift! We need not wander more but enter with our gift; Our gift of finest gold, Gold that was never bought nor sold; Myrrh to be strewn about his bed; Incense in clouds about his head; All for the Child who stirs not in his sleep. But holy slumber holds with ass and sheep. 2) Bend low about his bed, for each he has a gift; See how his eyes awake, lift up your hands, O lift! For gold, he gives a keen-edged sword (Defend with it Thy little Lord!), For incense, smoke of battle red. Myrrh for the honoured happy dead; Gifts for his children terrible and sweet, Touched by such tiny hands and Oh such tiny feet.

The anthem is a 1918 setting by Howells of the following poem by Frances Chesterton (1869-1938):

Here is the little door, lift up the latch, oh lift!
We need not wander more but enter with our gift;
Our gift of finest gold,
Gold that was never bought nor sold;
Myrrh to be strewn about his bed;
Incense in clouds about his head;
All for the Child who stirs not in his sleep.
But holy slumber holds with ass and sheep.

Bend low about his bed, for each he has a gift;
See how his eyes awake, lift up your hands, O lift!
For gold, he gives a keen-edged sword
(Defend with it Thy little Lord!),
For incense, smoke of battle red.
Myrrh for the honoured happy dead;
Gifts for his children terrible and sweet,
Touched by such tiny hands and
Oh such tiny feet.

Frances Chesterton (née Blogg) has been somewhat overshadowed in posterity by the fame of her husband G. K. Chesterton. Although the published author of four books, she is best known today for another Christmas poem,’How far is it to Bethlehem?’, set to a hymn tune and frequently subject to such twee renderings as these two. Howells’s setting of ‘Here is the Little Door’ is perhaps the perfect antidote to an over-sweetened Christmas, taking a subtle approach to a deeply ambivalent text.

Even in the relatively early ‘Here is the Little Door’ there is an indication of the mystical choral style that Howells would later make his own. The poem depicts the visit of the Magi, first through evocative description of the traditionally attributed gifts – gold, myrrh and incense. Howells uses a modal harmony throughout, with a hushed opening in A minor leading soon after to a blazing cadence in C major for ‘Our gift of finest gold’. At ‘Incense in clouds about his head’ Howells uses his characteristic ‘Phrygian’ flattened second in the bass. Indeed there is a brief settling on the Phrygian 2nd as a chord of Eb major at ‘sleep’ before a minor plagal cadence (with added 7th!) leads us to the D major conclusion of the first verse.

The second verse is where Howells’s word-painting comes to the fore in illustrating the ambivalence of Chesterton’s text. Christ repays the Magi with his own gifts – a sword and the smoke of battle, and returns the myrrh for embalming the ‘honoured happy dead’. A far cry from the childish innocence of ‘How far is it to Bethlehem?’. Howells first flags up the new atmosphere in his use of a modal B minor cadence (as opposed to G major in the first verse) on ‘lift up your hands, O lift’, and depicts the ‘keen-edged sword’ with a unison phrase on ‘Defend with it Thy little lord’. The piece then safely returns to rest with a repetition of the sublime extended plagal cadence of the first verse.

Despite this resolution, there is an uncomfortable tension wrought by the poem and setting which cannot be ignored. How can the Christmas message of peace and love be reconciled with a call to arms, attested by millennia of Christian warfare? I believe both poet and composer were alert to this tension, and should be commended for allowing these conflicting moods to sit side by side. Perhaps ‘Here is the Little Door’ can serve as a salutary reminder; that there is an ever-present possibility for bold faith to be used in the service of deadly hate. (Charlie Warren).

Perhaps, but G. K. was very militaristic, and wrote:

To Belloc

For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially;
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untravelled still,
I saw a moon that was the town’s,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.

Yea; Heaven is everywhere at home
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So is it with the heroic thing;
This shall not end for the world’s end
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend.

This did not end by Nelson’s urn
Where an immortal England sits–
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
‘Belike; but there are likelier things.’

Likelier across these flats afarThese sulky levels smooth and freeThe drums shall crash a waltz of warAnd Death shall dance with Liberty;Likelier the barricades shall blareSlaughter below and smoke above,And death and hate and hell declareThat men have found a thing to love.

Far from your sunny uplands set
I saw the dream; the streets I trod
The lit straight streets shot out and met
The starry streets that point to God.
This legend of an epic hour
A child I dreamed, and dream it still,
Under the great grey water-tower
That strikes the stars on Campden Hill

Gentle Mary laid her child is a Canadian carol by the Methodist mister Joseph Simpson Cook (1858–1933) Born in England he at a young age emigrated to Canada and attended McGill University. Cook followed John Wesley’s Catholic tendencies; he loved the church of England and saw the positive aspects of the Roman Catholic church.

Gentle Mary laid her Child
Lowly in a manger;
There He lay, the undefiled,
To the world a stranger:
Such a Babe in such a place,
Can He be the Savior?
Ask the saved of all the race
Who have found His favor.

2 Angels sang about His birth;
Wise men sought and found Him;
Heaven’s star shone brightly forth,
Glory all around Him:
Shepherds saw the wondrous sight,
Heard the angels singing;
All the plains were lit that night,
All the hills were ringing.

3 Gentle Mary laid her Child
Lowly in a manger;
He is still the undefiled,
But no more a stranger:
Son of God, of humble birth,
Beautiful the story;
Praise His name in all the earth,
Hail the King of glory!

The tune Weimar is by Melchior Vulpius (Latinized from Fuchs, fox). He wrote exclusively church music. As a composer, his roots are in the tradition of the Lutheran reformation. He avoided the new styles of bass continuo and monody and was, in a positive sense, a retainer of 16th-century musical style.

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Joseph dearest, Joseph mine is a traditional German carol, Josef, lieber Josef mein, which was originally sung as a lullaby by the Virgin Mary in 16th Century mystery plays in Leipzig, Germany.

The first Nowell is a traditional English carol, first published in 1823. The usual derivation of ‘Nowell’ is from the Old French ‘Nouel’, modern French ‘Noel’ from the Latin ‘natalis’, meaning ‘belonging to a birth’ (as in ‘Dies natalis’ meaning ‘birthday’). It is however also possible that the word should be linked with ‘novellare’ and ‘nouvelle’ with the implication that it is a cry of ‘News! News!’

1. The first Nowell the Angel1 did say
Was to three poor Shepherds in fields as they lay.1b
In fields where they lay keeping2 their sheep,
In a cold winter’s night that was so deep.3

Chorus
Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell.
Born is the King of Israel.

2. They looked up and saw a star
Shining in the East, beyond them far,
And to the earth it gave great light,
And so it continued, both day and night. Chorus

3. And by the light of that same Star
Three Wise Men came from country far,
To seek for a King was their intent,
And to follow the Star wherever it went. Chorus

4. This Star drew nigh to the North West;
O’er Bethlehem it took it’s rest.
And there it did both stop and stay,
Right4 over the place where Jesus lay. Chorus

5. Then did they know assuredly5
Within that house, the King did lie
One entered in then for to see
And found the babe in poverty. Chorus

6. Then enter’d in those Wise Men three,
Full reverently upon their knee,
And offer’d there, in his presence,
Their gold, and myrrh, and frankincense. Chorus

7. Between an ox stall and an ass,
This Child truly there born he was;
For want of clothing they did him lay
All in a manger, among the hay. Chorus

8. Then let us all with one accord
Sing praises to our heavenly Lord;
That hath made heaven and earth of nought,
And with his blood mankind hath bought. Chorus

9. If we in our time shall do well
We shall be free from death and Hell
For God hath prepared for us all
A resting place in general. Chorus

Sing of Mary, pure and lowly, also a Canadian carol, was written by Roland Ford Palmer (1891–1985), who was also born in England and in 1905 emigrated to Canada. Palmer was an Anglican priest who entered the Society of St John (Cowley fathers) in 1919 and founded its Canadian province in 1927. The text is based on an anonymous poem published in an Ilkeston, Derbyshire pamphlet c. 1914.

Sing of Mary, pure and lowly,
Virgin mother undefiled,
Sing of God’s own Son most holy,
Who became her little child.
Fairest child of fairest mother,
God the Lord who came to earth,
Word made flesh, our very brother,
Takes our nature by his birth.

Sing of Jesus, son of Mary,
In the home at Nazareth.
Toil and labour cannot weary
Love enduring unto death.
Constant was the love he gave her,
Though he went forth from her side,
Forth to preach, and heal, and suffer,
Till on Calvary he died.

Glory be to God the Father;
Glory be to God the Son;
Glory be to God the Spirit;
Glory to the Three in One.
From the heart of blessed Mary,
From all saints the song ascends,
And the Church the strain reechoes
Unto earth’s remotest ends.

The tune Pleading Saviour was composed by Joshua Leavitt (1794–1873), a Congregational minister, who was for many years musical advisor to the most famous revivalist of the Second Great Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney. In 1831 Leavitt compiled and published The Christian Lyre, the first hymnal to print music for every hymn. He was first Secretary of the American Temperance Society and co-founder of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society. He aided a slave Basil Dorsey to escape from Maryland to Massachusetts and formed the Amistad Committee to raise funds for the defense of Amistad captives.